


Radiohead

by Anonymous



Series: Within/Without [11]
Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: 3x10 insert, M/M, domestic buddie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24314971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “Buck,” Eddie said. “I know this is something we don’t talk about, and you can tell me if I’m overstepping, but… where are your parents?”“They’re in Hershey P-A,” he said.“You know that’s not what I mean,” Eddie said quietly.Buck can’t stop worrying after Bobby is exposed to radioactive chemicals. Eddie tries to reassure him but opens up a new line of questioning instead.(3x10 “Christmas Spirit” insert)
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley & Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV), Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Series: Within/Without [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1738876
Comments: 29
Kudos: 528
Collections: Anonymous





	Radiohead

“Eddie, are you hearing this?” he demanded. “Marie Curie spent her whole life chronically ill from radiation poisoning; she developed a bunch of cataracts and then she up and died from aplastic anemia. It says here that she was exposed to such large doses that her lab notebooks are still radioactive and will be for another—whoa—1500 years _._ ”

“That was a long time ago,” Eddie said, snagging two more beers from the fridge. “Nobody knew how dangerous it was back then, they weren’t using any kind of PPE. Bobby had his mask, his gear, and he was only downwind of the fire for a few seconds. That’s not much exposure.”

“According to the linear no-threshold model,” Buck read on stubbornly, “any exposure to ionizing radiation, even at doses too low to produce any symptoms of radiation sickness, can induce cancer due to cellular and genetic damage.”

“Where are you getting this? Wikipedia?” Eddie shoved one of the beers into his hand.

“Mayo Clinic.” Buck took a long drink and turned back to his laptop. “Remember the Fukushima thing? Did you know there’s a 70% higher risk of developing thyroid cancer for—”

Eddie closed the laptop and moved it out of reach. “That was a whole nuclear power plant that melted down. Plus it got into the water, which—”

Buck took out his phone. The Wikipedia entry on cobalt-60 he’d been reading earlier was still up on the screen. “Because it decays by gamma radiation, external exposure to Cobalt-60 can increase cancer risk. It’s absorbed by the liver, kidneys, bones, and—”

“Buck, seriously—”

“Holy shit, listen to this: in 2013 a truck carrying a disused cobalt teletherapy machine from a hospital in Tijuana was carjacked at a gas station near Mexico City. Even though the machine was considered obsolete as a medical device, it still contained 3000 curies—curies? Is that like Marie Curie? Super rad if they named it after her, she sounds like a dope lady—3000 curies of cobalt-60, a Category 1 synthetic radioactive isotope, more than enough to kill anyone exposed to it and—”

Eddie confiscated his phone and stuck it in his own back pocket, out of reach. Well, out of reach unless Buck decided to grope Eddie’s ass for it, and he wasn’t ruling that out.

“Can I have my phone back please?”

“Nope.” Eddie leaned against the wall; Buck would really have to grapple with him if he decided to recover the phone by force. He flushed slightly, remembering the last time they’d faced off in his kitchen like this.

_You wanna go for the title?_

Eddie said, “You need to chill out, man. All you’re doing is borrowing trouble, and you know what the viejas say about that.”

“What’s a vieja?”

“Spanish for little old lady. And they say _don’t_. In case you were wondering.” Eddie shook his head. “Just ask my abuelita.”

“It’s only, uh.” Buck picked at his cuticle. He’d been picking at it for hours and now the skin was raw, his nailbed lined with dried blood.

“Quit doing that.” Eddie pushed off the wall and grabbed his hand. “Seriously, now you’ve made it bleed again. C’mon, dumbass.” He towed them into the downstairs bathroom and started rifling through the medicine cabinet. “Where are your band-aids? You used to keep them up here somewhere.”

“Ran out,” Buck said, vaguely. He was thinking about the symptoms of radiation sickness: in addition to nosebleeds (check), common indicators included nausea, fever, fatigue, inflammation, bruising… If a person vomited less than an hour after being exposed, that meant the dose received was very high; he was pretty sure Bobby hadn’t vomited, but he wasn’t certain. He’d have to text him to ask. “I really do need my phone,” he told Eddie.

Eddie squeezed some neosporin onto his thumb and wrapped a kleenex around it. “Emergency field medicine. Should hold you together.”

“Seriously, Eddie.”

“What do you need it for?” Eddie asked, in the tone of voice he employed whenever Christopher was being unusually truculent.

“I need to ask Bobby if he puked within the hour after his exposure. ’Cause that usually means death is—”

“Man, you’re killing me right now.” Eddie sighed. “You got anything stronger than beer?”

They retired to Buck’s couch with a bottle of whiskey.

“Woodford Reserve.” Eddie raised his eyebrows. “Since when have you been a bourbon man?”

“It was a present from Bobby,” Buck said heavily. He poured them each a shot. “He gave it to me when I got the screws out of my leg. I was saving it for Christmas, but… Christmas fuckin’ sucks this year. Fuck Christmas.”

“Fuck Christmas,” Eddie agreed, and clinked their glasses together.

“Can I have my phone back now? You’re gonna crush it under your fat ass.”

“I think you mean glutes of steel.” Eddie extricated Buck’s phone from his back pocket, but all he did was slip it into a front one. Which would make for a much more awkward extraction maneuver. As Eddie had probably calculated. Bastard. “And nope. I’m gonna hang onto it a while longer.”

Awesome.

“Speaking of Christmas,” Eddie said. “Bobby told me that you told a bunch of little kids at the superstore that Santa wasn’t real. Harsh move, Buckley.”

“That’s _so_ not what happened!” Buck exclaimed, indignant. “I didn’t tell them _Santa_ wasn’t real, obviously I would never do that, I just told them that the guy who got hit with the pepper spray wasn’t really Santa. I thought it would make them feel better, ’cause who wants to see Santa with his face all fucked up, yelling and crying and stuff?”

“Grinch.”

“Why are you sticking up for fake Santa?” Buck wanted to know. “Abuela told me that when you were a kid, you puked on mall Santa two years consecutively. Out of _fear._ ”

“Abuela told you that?” Eddie looked outraged. 

“She tells me lots of things, Edmundo,” he said smugly. “Every time I pick Chris up from her place, she feeds me and tells me stories about you. If I ever have to blackmail you, you’re definitely toast.”

He refilled their glasses. He’d been too wound up to eat much of the falafel they’d brought back for dinner, and he could already feel the liquid warmth of the whiskey creeping into his bones. He would definitely be regretting his life choices soon, but for now he was just grateful that the gnawing ache of fear in his chest had dulled. The mere thought of losing Bobby was a vertiginous fall off a very steep cliff, and he was afraid, he was so afraid—

“You’re doing it again.” Eddie seized his hand; he’d been unconsciously picking at his cuticles again.

“Sorry.” He started bouncing his leg.

Eddie turned his hand over, palm-up, and dragged his thumb along Buck’s lifeline. “You’re a whole bundle of tics tonight,” he observed. Buck swallowed hard; Eddie was all but holding his hand, well, no, Eddie was _pressing_ his hand, which was different, but his heart was still pounding in his ears—

He was paranoid Eddie could hear it, too, so he started talking. “It’s just, I never thought it would be something like cancer,” he babbled, still acutely conscious of the pressure of Eddie’s fingers on his hand. “Not for any of us. Accidents happen, crazy shit—just look at Chim. So many ways for us to die. That ladder truck could’ve crushed me like an ant, and the tsunami—. Well, you spent years in a warzone, you know how it goes.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. He released his hand, and Buck felt sort of relieved, also a bit sorry. But then Eddie was turning to face him on the couch, one arm slung along the back, leg tucked under him. The full force of Eddie’s attention always discombobulated him; it was like an x-ray, and he could never quite determine the prognosis. But Eddie’s expression was serious, intent. He was listening.

So Buck kept talking. “I understand the risks that come with the job—I know you guys would say I run right into them—but I’m not afraid of dying that way.”

Eddie nodded.

“Like, it would totally suck and obviously I don’t want to, there’s my sister, and Christopher, and”— _you_ “—and, uh, other people who mean a lot to me…”

“We have people we fight like hell to come home to,” Eddie said firmly.

Buck nodded, grateful Eddie hadn’t pressed the issue of _people who mean a lot to me._ “But even so, I’ve—I made my peace with that kind of death a long time ago. I think we all have, to some extent, or we wouldn’t be here, right?”

“Right,” Eddie said.

He could always count on Eddie for clear-eyed realism; Eddie wouldn’t try to deter him with stupid Hallmark platitudes. 

“But something long and slow? Like cancer? I don’t think I could stand watching Bobby wither away like that, it would fucking kill me, you know? Radiation, chemo, poison on top of poison, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how strong or smart or _good_ someone is, or how much the people in their life need them to stick around.”

Eddie didn’t say anything, but his eyes were steady. Another time, Buck would have lost himself in those eyes, wondering what Eddie was thinking or feeling, tumbling ever deeper as he tried to plumb the depths of Eddie’s soul. Eddie had beautiful eyes, and they were the only part of his face he couldn’t exert total control over. Eddie’s eyes reacted, they _felt_ , even when the rest of his face was schooled into impassivity.

“I—I _need_ Bobby,” Buck said. “I know I’m doing the thing, the thing where I make it all about me, but he’s one of the most important people in my life, like, I’m not even sure if I _exist_ without Bobby.”

“Buck,” Eddie said. He tilted his head slightly, like he was making some kind of assessment. A risk-assessment. “I know this is something we don’t talk about, and you can tell me if I’m overstepping, but… where are your parents?”

“They’re in Hershey P-A,” he said.

“You know that’s not what I mean,” Eddie said quietly.

“I…” Oh, Jesus. Where to begin. It didn’t hurt to talk about, exactly; it was more like a hollow reminder of emptiness, or nullity. A vacancy.

“You don’t have to talk about it, if it’s too…” Eddie was saying, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“No, no, whatever you’re thinking, it’s not like that,” he intervened hastily, because he couldn’t have Eddie thinking _that._ “It’s… My parents are nothing, Eddie, they… Some people just shouldn’t be parents, y’know? My parents are cold as ice. My whole childhood they were, like, totally detached from me and Maddie. We had money, we never _lacked_ , not in the material sense. But emotionally… there was nothing there. No _there_ there. They never hugged us, kissed us, anything. They were just these… figures. Total strangers. Maddie, she basically raised me. Till she met Doug, and he took her away. After that, I guess I… sort of raised myself.”

“I always thought it was strange,” Eddie said. “That no one came, all those times you almost died last year.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, dude, but you’re the only one of our team with an actual, like, family. Blood family, I mean—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. The rest of us? Island of Misfit Toys.” 

“I never thought about it like that.” Eddie rubbed his chin. It had been several days since he’d shaved, and there was a dark shadow of stubble across his jaw. “I guess I always took it for granted, big Mexican family, everybody minding each other’s business, parents a pain in my ass, always thinking they know better for Christopher, but… you’re right. Chris and I are lucky to have ’em.” Then Eddie smiled and squeezed his shoulder. “You’re a fuckin’ miracle, you know that, man?”

Buck squinted at him. “What—what do you mean?”

“Because you could’ve turned out cold, too, like your parents. But you’re not, you’re the opposite…”

“You calling me hot, Diaz?” He couldn’t resist. There was a balloon expanding in his chest, making him breathless and a little dizzy.

“Shut up. I’m saying you’ve got a big heart that’s always working overtime for other people, and it’s kind of a miracle that the best heart I know came out of a situation like that.”

Buck sank back against the pillows to process that. _The best heart I know_ , Eddie had said. Those words warmed him inside-out, just like the whiskey. If Eddie still thought he was a good person, after all the shit he’d pulled… But had Eddie meant them, or was he just trying to make him feel better for having shitty parents? He didn’t want Eddie to pity him; that was why he never talked about his family, because it sounded like such a sympathy-grab and he had _no right_ , not after all the losses and hardships Eddie had endured.

He glanced over at Eddie. Eddie was still looking at him, his eyes hadn’t wavered. And his lips were slightly parted, like he was on the verge of saying something else. Buck realized that his silence was probably pressuring Eddie into further reassurances, into dredging up more nice things to say—

“Well, it explains a lot, doesn’t it?” He forced a laugh. “Why Maddie ended up with a guy like Doug, why Maddie _stayed_ with a guy like Doug, and why I’m such a basket case—”

“You’re not a basket case,” Eddie interrupted.

“—a sex addict—”

“Self-diagnosed,” Eddie reminded him.

“Whatever. Frank read me like a textbook.”

“Frank.” Eddie grimaced slightly.

“Hey, it’s not his fault. Frank knows his shit. Not that I really needed him to tell me that Bobby’s the closest thing I’ve got to a parent—or at least he was, before I went and sued his ass.”

“Water under the bridge for all of us,” Eddie said.

“Says the guy who joined Fight Club because he needed a surrogate to punch.”

“I’m not doing this with you again,” Eddie said, a hint of impatience creeping into his voice.

“But—”

“The guy I almost killed with my bare hands? That was _after_ we made up, Buck.”

“Unresolved feelings?” he suggested.

“Yeah, about Shannon and the divorce.”

Buck refilled their glasses.

“Well, thanks for what you said. About my, um, heart and whatever.”

“Meant every word.” Eddie’s mouth curled into a rueful half-smile. “And you know how much I hate using my words.”

“Yeah, I—”

Music exploded out of Eddie’s front pocket, making them both jump.

“That would be me,” Buck said.

“Obviously,” said Eddie, bracing himself against Buck’s shoulder to dig the phone out of his pocket.

“My Christopher ringtone,” Buck explained. “It’s the theme song from _Finding Nemo._ ”

“Why is your Christopher ringtone the theme from—”

“Long story, inside joke. Can I have my phone now?”

“And why is my son calling you at—“ Eddie checked the time as he handed it over—“quarter to nine? He should’ve been asleep fifteen minutes ago, I wonder why Carla—”

Buck accepted the facetime request. “Hey, superman!” he said. “What’re you doing up so late?”

“I couldn’t sleep.” Christopher was in bed, the covers pulled up to his chin. “So Carla said I could call you.”

“I’ve got your dad here, too.” Buck scooted closer to Eddie and draped an arm around his neck, hauling him into the frame.

“Hi Daddy! Are you and Bucky having a sleepover?”

“We’re just having a play-date,” Eddie said. “Sometimes me and Buck need a play-date after a long shift at work. I’ll be home…” he looked at the glasses and the bottle of whiskey on the table. “Pretty soon. Why couldn’t you sleep, bud?”

“Christmas,” Christopher said.

Buck exchanged a glance with Eddie.

“You’re gonna have such a good time with your cousins,” he offered, trying to sound upbeat at the prospect. There was nothing he’d wanted more than Christmas with Eddie and Christopher; they’d even talked about it, before they got their shift assignments. At first he’d been almost as disappointed as Christopher, but since the accident in the tunnel, he’d been so primed for more bad news he was just as glad they were skipping Christmas. He didn’t have it in him to force the holiday cheer.

“No, I’m worried Bobby’s going to die before Christmas,” Christopher explained. “I don’t want him to.”

“Wh-who told you that Bobby was gonna die?” Buck stammered; at the same time, Eddie said, “Bobby’s not gonna die, kid, where’d you get that idea?”

“Denny,” Christopher said. “Denny heard his moms talking about it. They said Bobby had a radio inside of him and the radio could make him sick and he could die. Christmas is only two days away, but what if the radio gets him first?”

“I think Denny misunderstood what his moms were saying,” Eddie replied, elbowing Buck in the ribs as he did. “Bobby got exposed to something called radiation, and sometimes a lot of radiation can make a person sick. But Bobby only got a little bit, so he’s gonna be just fine.”

Christopher pushed his glasses up his nose. “Then why is Bucky scared?”

“I’m—” He and Eddie were careful what they told Christopher sometimes, but they never lied to him. “I’m scared ’cause Bobby’s very important to me, Chris, and I don’t want him to get sick. But your dad’s right. Bobby’s not gonna die before Christmas.”

“Or after Christmas,” Eddie said, a little sharply.

“Yeah, so don’t worry about it, bud. Try and get a good night’s sleep, okay?”

“Okay,” Christopher said obediently. They watched him take his glasses off and settle down against the pillow. “I love you, Dad. I love you, Buck.”

“I love you, too,” they chorused, smiling and waving until Buck ended the call.

Then Eddie rounded on him. “‘Bobby’s not gonna die before Christmas’? Seriously, dude?”

“I know, I know.” He dropped his head into his hands. “I suck.”

Eddie’s hand settled on his neck. “Tell you what, why don’t you just come home with me?”

“Really?” He left his head in his hands; he didn’t want to seem too eager to take Eddie up on it.

“If I leave you here, you’re gonna stay up all night researching radiation stuff.” Eddie’s grip on his neck tightened a little. “I’m not asking, Buckley. You can make the three of us breakfast in the morning.”

“What, did you run out of cereal or something?” Smirking, he looked up in time to catch Eddie considering him with the oddest expression on his face. He couldn’t find the word for it, but it made him feel at ease; it reassured him, somehow, that Eddie wasn’t just asking because he felt sorry for him. In moments like this he could feel the air thickening around them, becoming slow and sticky like molasses. He wished they could talk about it, but he wasn’t sure how to bring it up.

_It._

The bizarre barometric changes, like air converting spontaneously to molasses.

The way Eddie made him feel. The balloon inside his chest.  
  
The radio inside his head, tuned to the frequency of _Eddie, Eddie, Eddie._

The rush of saying _I love you too_ at the same time as Eddie, even though they were talking to Christopher. _Because_ they were talking to Christopher.

His lizard brain, though, made him bite his tongue and keep _it_ to himself. The most primitive of survival instincts urged him to protect what he had, not to throw everything away for a feeling he still couldn’t quantify.

So he took a deep breath and said, “Yeah, I guess I can make you some omelets.” 

“Good,” Eddie said. “C’mon, let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading! The next installment will be a little more lighthearted, I promise.


End file.
